With Vanguard Going Free to Play, PlanetSide Becomes the Last SOE Subscription Based MMO

Back then, only four games remained subscription based. And even then, rumblings seemed to indicate Vanguard might have a free to play role in the line up. That was clearly the wave of the future at SOE.

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For some reason I always assumed Planetside would close when the sequel launched. I’ve never played it so I don’t have a horse in this race and I haven’t really been paying close attention. I will play PS2 if its free, though, which it will be.

I really wish SOE’s “free” to play conversions didn’t seem so abysmally restrictive. I much prefer the model that lets you play with everything and spend money on cosmetic/beneficial/cool/fun extras rather than giving you a tiny little subset of the content and saying “oh, you want out of that? Pay up!”

As much as I think cash store ships in Star Trek Online are overpriced and the lockboxes are annoying, it is otherwise almost completely painless to play F2P, and I wish more of the conversions were like that. The massive race/class restrictions in EQ are a real turn off for me.

Hmm, speaking of which, if you previously had a character that belongs to a non-free race/class can you still play it, or do you need to unlock the race & class in order to make an existing character playable?

@Warsyde – I think one thing that SOE does right, both for them and us, is the Silver “one time buy in” upgrade that Cryptic lacks. Its another source of cash, but its also a great deal for us to pay a one time fee to get some basic things that every player wants – extra character slots, access to better skills and equipment, etc. As a result, games like EQ and EQ2 have gotten money out of me, even though I’m not a player that shells out $10 for a horse.

Beyond that, the only game that should get criticized for “pay for content” is LotRO, and rightly so. The idea that I have to pay to unlock quest givers in each individual area challenges the very idea of the game being F2P.

I think Planetside will shut down when Planetside 2 launches. There’s no reason to keep it running, if I remember correctly SOE has said that Planetside 2 will run on computers capable of playing Planetside anyway. Either way, the game already has enough trouble with hackers which would only get worse under free to play.

Omali, I don’t know where you heard that PS2 will run on machines that can handle PS1, but that’s absurd. PS2 has such high system requirements that you’ll need a government supercomputer just to run it at medium settings…